Menage_a_20_-_Tales_with_a_Hook

by Twenty Goodreads Authors

  Every day she would escape for an hour. On her way to the grocery store for limp vegetables or the damaged fruit Mr. Lundkist would let her have cheap, she would stop by Old Elmo’s window and watch mesmerized how the little magician crafted glass animals with a gas torch and thin glass bars.

  In winter, Elmo would blow glass bubbles with chubby Santa Clauses inside, complete with pointed hats. On Sundays, Elmo would set a tray with his precious creatures outside Church and offer them for five dollars to passerby’s. Barbara couldn’t afford five dollars, but one day Elmo gave her Nena for two. After that, she would save every penny to add, every few weeks, another morning confidant to her menagerie.

  She had told the sergeant Chester often didn’t get off the sofa for weeks. But sometimes he did. Like the day he discovered her treasure, and dropped them before her eyes down the trash grinder, and reduced her allowance by two dollars.

  Sonia Tatum, a fleshless spinster of fifty with a pronounced limp, marched across the marble expanse of the funeral home’s lobby, her sister Edna in tow.

  “Thank you, Barbara, we’ll take over for the family.” Barbara rested a plastic carrier bag on the floor and dug her hands in her pockets. “You’ll take over?”

  “That’s correct.” She gestured a curt dismissal to two men standing to a side. “I’m Sonia Tatum, we’ll hold the funeral services at St. Patrick’s for entombment at the family pantheon.”

  One of the men, clad in a raven suit and tie, frowned before composing a face of dire toothache. The other man, sober-faced, remained in the background.

  “There must be a mistake, Mrs. Tatum. The decedent’s spouse, Mrs. Barbara Tatum here, ordered cremation.”

  “We’ll have none of that!”

  “And... how do you propose to stop me?”

  Sonia didn’t turn around. “Mister...?”

  “Purvis, Oscar Purvis.”

  “Oscar, until I return with Judge Martin, I order you to ignore anything affecting my brother’s remains.”

  Mr. Purvis pouted his lips and stared pointedly to the carrier bag at Barbara Tatum’ feet.

  Sonia froze.

  The other man, in corduroy jeans and a knitted jacket, produced a small card rectangle and offered it to Sonia. “I’m Philip Strout, from Strout, Buckleworth and Perry of New York City, acting for Mrs. Tatum. We have correctly filed all documents. My client, as the decedent’s spouse, has acted within her rights, requested cremation and taken possession of the ashes.”

  “I see.” Sonia turned around and lowered her glasses a fraction. “Have it your way, dear. I will ensure we contest my brother’s will till kingdom come. You’ll be old before you touch a penny.”

  The lawyer was about to retort when Barbara collected her carrier bag and stepped forward. She ran her eyes past the thin, flat chest and narrow shoulders, the angular elbows and prominent shoulder-blades, the sallow skin and sharp features, the deeply set, pale blue eyes, and the lusterless, ashen hair of Sonia Tatum. “Without a will, Connecticut intestacy statutes prescribe that after payment of debts, taxes and administrative expenses, the surviving spouse takes the entire estate of the decedent, if there are no surviving children. There are no children... surviving or otherwise as your brother was too lazy to engage in the necessary maneuvers to promote such an event. I have a deposition from my late husband’s lawyers to the effect that he died intestate.” She blinked twice at her lawyer. “Have I said it right?”

  Mr. Strout smiled. “You’ve added enlightening details, but the gist is there.”

  Barbara gripped the carrier bag handles more tightly and then darted a look at an overhead clock. “How the time flies!” With quick steps she marched toward the exit.

  Sheldon Klein, CEO of Pffalzer Merris, wrung his hands once and stepped over to Barbara Tatum, nodding silent thanks to his secretary. Just a few minutes before, the widow had driven to the gates and a sharp-witted security officer had immediately raised head office.

  “Please, accept my condolences.” He tried for a mournful face but a sparkle in her eye hinted at his failure to make an impression. He drew two fingers to her elbow and gestured to a low table and easy chairs. “We’ll be more comfortable there. Can I offer you some tea, coffee, perhaps juice?”

  “Tea will be fine, thanks.” When Mrs. Simmons left after serving the tea, Sheldon leaned forward, fingers cradled in his lap. The woman appeared a little vacant, no doubt still shocked by her loss. “How can I be of help, Mrs. Tatum?”

  “I believe you needed land to expand your business.” Sheldon repressed a strong urge to bolt upright, jump up-and-down on the chair and yell. Then, a little warning sounded deep in his mind.

  She hadn’t used lawyers or go-betweens. She must be confused and he would be taking advantage of a defenseless widow. “We had considered—”

  “How much?”

  A hundred acres would be beyond his wildest dreams. “Two hundred acres.”

  “Forty million.”

  Sheldon jerked straight. That was twice market value.

  “I’m afraid—”

  “Fifty million.”

  “But—”

  Mrs. Tatum moved to stand up.

  “Deal!” Sheldon slammed his open palm on the table.

  The crockery danced. Damn, she’s taking me to the cleaners. She beamed and reached into a worn handbag. “I

  believe you operate in your factory a sophisticated coating

  process; am I right?”

  Sheldon nodded, the sudden void in his stomach

  deepening.

  “You can give a hard coat to particles of almost any

  size?”

  He nodded again. Now what? She was closing in for the

  kill?

  “You can coat a particle to; say the size of a mustard

  seed?”

  Mustard seeds? More confused than ever he continued

  nodding.

  “And smaller? Like a grain of sand?”

  “Mrs. Tatum, perhaps if you told me....”

  “Can you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Durable coating?”

  “Very.”

  “Excellent.” She drew a folded sheet of paper and

  offered it across the table. “That’s what I want you to do

  for me. In exchange you can have the land....”

  His heart skipped a beat.

  “For fifty million.”

  He read the lines and the painstaking specification of

  Granulometry: the size and shape attributes of individual

  granules and other particles, density and hardness. It had

  been drafted by an expert and the order was preposterous.

  Sheldon swallowed and was about to complain when he

  heard in his mind her calm voice announcing ‘sixty

  million’. He pushed the folded page into his top pocket

  and took her firm handshake.

  Barbara leaned back and rested her head on an improvised pillow made with a new Egyptian cotton towel, folded over the bathtub’s edge. Through wafts of steam she gazed at the narrow shelf by the hand basin and the tiny figures of Nena, Tim, Bobby, Jeremy, Nicholas and Emma; all lovingly recreated by Elmo Calhoun, They were soon to be joined by Ernie, Douglas and frisky Jemima.

  She reached lazily to a cup propped on the bath’s ledge and sipped a little champagne; she’d been so busy all-day that she forgot to buy a flute glass. Her mind flew to Elmo and his magical talent, her hand brushing the lozengeshaped hollow glass medallion resting between her breasts. Elmo had encased it within a web of silver wires. She blew a little foam from its surface to admire its dense black contents: the ashes from Chester Tatum’s holographic testament, lovingly rescued from her alcohol burner.

  She whistled ‘Du soleil plein les yeux’, felt happy and foolish, giggled and drank a little more champagne. Then she turned her head to the ledge just above her head. Yes. Elmo was a master artisan and today he’d given ample proof of his uncan
ny talent with his latest creation.

  She reached a hand coated in fragrant suds to heft her new beautiful hourglass, turned it upside down and stared mesmerized as Chester Tatum’s ashes—expertly transformed into perfect grains of the right size and consistency by the scientists at Pffalzer Merris—streamed down to form a pretty little cone.

  “Now, my dear, you must exercise a little.”

  The Painter of Winds

  Isabella Erlenmeyer

  Copyright © Oscar Croselt 2009 There was a sea of rye with a dimple to one side, a shallow depression like the hollow a smile makes on a happy baby’s cheek. Brackish water filled the dimple, its margins a blur of cottonwoods. Lionel Davies relaxed his gaze into a horizon of wheat fields punctuated by shadows and inspected the brush strokes. In the brownish haze surrounding the water’s edge, the paint seemed to ripple.

  It had become a raw, blustery day on Walton Bay. Heavy clouds, smudged like thumbprints, moved in after an almost perfect dawn. There was a taste of cooler weather working its way up from the valley and grimy clouds pressed down as if trying to bow the reeds into submission. In a field, tall flowers are tossed everywhere in a gale, but rushes are stronger and bend with the wind to stand erect once again after the storm.

  The canvas was finished; another brush stroke would spoil it.

  With a sigh, Lionel scraped a little unused paint from his palette, cleaned the spatula on a clump of grass, and rearranged the oils in a large box, making room to one side for a jar of turpentine.

  Most people feel compelled to add something more to an already well-balanced scene; another piece of furniture to a pleasant living room; another paragraph to a vibrant chapter ending; another kiss to a fatigued lover yielding to slumber.

  Out of the gloom and the wispy fog, wings flapped, a gull swooped past Lionel in a blur—and landed next to the water. It strutted for a moment, pecked at something on the ground, peered at itself in the murky water, and took wing as if frightened by its reflection. Lionel knew how it felt.

  With precise movements borne of constant practice, Lionel gathered his folding seat, secured canvas to easel for the short walk home, hefted his paint box, and plodded through a much-trampled path cutting across the rye. It had been a perfect day to capture young winds dashing through fields like frisky colts testing their legs before the elders called them to heel. Overhead, clouds massed and the pubescent gale matured by the minute. A wonderful day.

  Lionel reached the barn as the first rain painted the old wood a darker color. Soon, slanted sheets would rake the fields and the wind, swallowed by the gale, would be no more.

  Under the struggling light from a fly-spattered bulb, he propped the paint box and the seat over planks resting on trestles, removed the canvas from the easel, and after locating an empty space on the crowded walls, hung it from a twine thread he’d fitted earlier. Back by the trestles, he leaned back and gazed at his work; hundreds of canvases of wind cavorting through impossible fields, his lifeblood painfully drawn from his body and pasted on cloth. Tired older breezes jostled for space with puffs, gusts, and intermittent wafts of teasing young winds as the storms and gales—judiciously sent to the rear of the barn—roared with overwhelming tenacity.

  Winds, beautiful winds, his winds.

  Twenty years of toil and despair and he’d never sold a painting, had never basked on critical praises, nor drunk the marvel in an admirer’s eye. To share his work with others would be like seeking tenderness from hookers; only meat is fit to barter, the soul is for gifts. He touched his fingertips before him and tapped all ten against one another.

  Outside, the storm raged, timber creaked, and a clod of mud carried by the gale hit the doors with the sloppy sound of an arrow on a wet target. Inside, his winds rustled the canvases.

  He had set to distilling the essence of wind through countless tries to capture its fickle nature, and in doing so, he’d learned about wind, loneliness, and self-denial.

  Yes, Lionel mused, you tell yourself you’ve learned a lot about life from misfortune and maybe you have. But it’s all an illusion; you only learned about pain, about the wildeyed crazy bastard down in the silt at the bottom of your psyche. You were never able to force the cuddly little lamb of idealism to lie down with the fierce lion of realism and make nice-nice. No, and he never would. He had tamed idealistic painting and shared its secrets in a world inured to magic.

  His stomach rumbled. How long since he’d eaten? Two days? Three? It was difficult to keep track of such things.

  He reached to the floor and fingered a blanket, slightly damp and uninviting, all that was left from the house now mortgaged to the hilt, empty as a husk and as useless. The barn had been his home for years, close to the wind in his canvases.

  After the necessary visual rest to take the scene afresh, unencumbered by memories, he stared at his latest work. Yes, there was wind there.

  Without looking back, he reached behind him to a cookie tin, the only object on the shelf. With smooth movements, his eyes never deserting his last canvas, he hefted his old well-oiled revolver. Lionel Davies pushed its snout into his mouth and pulled the trigger

  53 Anyone watching Bernard O’Hara may have maliciously assumed the roaring fire rising from the pyre stirred memories of Torquemada or the Autos de Fe from The Holy Inquisition.

  It didn’t. Parson O’Hara pondered—his eyes unfocused past the dancing flames—the folly of human existence and how the product of a man’s life could reduce to ashes in minutes.

  When Matt Benson from B&B Dairies had found Lionel, the man must have been dead two weeks, his body ripe enough for Matt to catch a whiff when he passed the barn with his truffle dog looking for the rare fungus.

  A coroner from the city arrived in a van with a bunch of young helpers, probably students, held a conference with the sheriff and the judge, packed the corpse in a stout bag and left the way he came. Then the vultures from the bank took over. The land was the only valuable thing in the lot, they decreed, the barn and the house beyond recovery.

  Ernie Welsh, from the farm just below, had inspected the rafters and kicked here and there before offering a thousand dollars for the lot. The judge, old Silas Miller, jumped at the offer and that was that.

  Ernie called at church and asked O’Hara to drop by, in case a few items of decrepit furniture could be of use to the parish. That was in the morning. Now, the setting sun competed with the pyre. The scant contents of house and barn had been piled high and set ablaze. Scores of drab canvasses, flea-bitten mattresses, furniture and the pitiful belongings of a deranged soul went up in smoke.

  “You knew him well, Father?” Ernie dragged his feet before flopping down on an upturned bucket by the pyre.

  “Very little. I never saw him in church.”

  “Care for a tot?” Ernie offered a half-full bottle of bourbon.

  “Aye.” O’Hara took a swig and handed the bottle back.

  “I couldn’t make head to tail of the paintings, could you?”

  “Not really. The same color daubed repeatedly over the same spots. They look all the same to me.”

  A little later, just before nine o’clock, while the sunset glow still brood on the fields Ernie stood, finished the last of the bottle and tossed it onto the embers.

  “What will you do with that one?” He gestured to O’Hara’s pick-up and a large canvas wedged between a chest of drawers and a few chairs.

  “I don’t know. It occurred to me he couldn’t be a real artist until someone hangs one of his canvases.”

  Ernie frowned. “I don’t follow.”

  “It’s like writers; unless they publish they don’t exist.”

  “I see.”

  O’Hara doubted it but didn’t comment.

  The fire died down, the flammable bits reduced to embers, as the last glow of the dying sun fizzled on the horizon. Shadows skulked in and out over the mountains as the wind rose and fell. A flurry of sparks rose from the embers followed by gentle sizzling taps. O’Hara d
rew a hand to his forehead and inspected his fingers.

  “It’s raining.”

  “Aye, and it will pour down before long. You better be gone with that lot.

  When O’Hara made it to his house and backed the pickup into the garage, the roofs glistened with moisture and the eaves dripped. A crow cawed somewhere. Soon it would rain in earnest. He hefted the canvas, brought it into the house, propped it at the end of the corridor and went into the kitchen to rustle a light dinner. He would think what to do with the painting in the morning. Perhaps he would hang it in the laundry room, to hide a wall discoloration caused by a leaking water heater.

  Over a salad made from leftover potatoes, a tomato and a boiled egg, he thought of Lionel, loneliness, paranoia and the thousand-and-one-things he had to do the following day, preparing the church for the Decker’s wedding and filling up several long overdue reports to the bishopric.

  What drives a man to eat a gun? The question had nagged him all day, and made him feel inadequate because he didn’t know the answer. As a shepherd of men he should know. Mental illness was obvious, but inadequate. O’Hara sensed something deeper.

  The trick to defuse depression is to identify its onset in the early stages. O’Hara poured himself a decent portion of straight Jack Daniels, adjourned to his study and reached for a much-thumbed copy of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, not a reading most befitting a priest, he thought. With the noise of slanted rain pelting the windowpanes as background, and the warming comfort of the liqueur, O’Hara sat on his favorite and only easy chair and relaxed. Soon he was immersed in the lust and greed of the clergy and the dangers and adventures of traveling merchants.

  He must have dozed off because he jolted alert and dropped the book. It had stopped raining, its noise replaced by strange clangs and creaks outside the door, like someone stumbling in the dark.